With the darling of social media at this moment in time still being Twitter, it is easy to forget that Twitter is based upon the key attributes of blogging.
So this month I am revisiting ‘ye old faithful’ blog. Why? Well, for those of you looking at ways of maximising social media marketing, it is important to have a solid foundation for all your other related efforts. The blog platform can provide this. Your corporate blog, if used correctly, becomes more than just an area to publish thoughts or latest company news, slightly reworded to sound conversational, and becomes a launchpad for listening and engagement.
Blog ‘conversation strategy’
This goes beyond what topics to post about, how regularly you should post and tone of voice. It’s also necessary to follow industry or competitor blogs, to consolidate their feeds into your RSS reader and to read them regularly.
By monitoring the blogosphere you show you are listening. This allows you to take a considered approach when responding to posts on other blogs via comments. It enables you to assess what competitors and prospects are talking about, and to gather competitor intelligence.
The purpose of putting in place a blogging conversation strategy is not only to show your knowledge and expertise by posting on other blogs in response to articles, but to raise awareness of your activity and to further encourage other blog users to return to your own blog and participate in the conversation taking place within your domain, where you can build stronger relationships.
‘Engagement’ strategy
So, look beyond the simple engagement strategy of users responding to individual posts via comments and blog regularly to maintain engagement as well as ensuring your posts are getting eyeballs by driving traffic to your blog. And think about using your corporate blog as a launchpad for other social media campaign activities.
For example, if your company has produced a slide presentation or white paper, add this content to your blog posts and ensure that the content is shareable. If you have a PR campaign running in tandem, then direct journalists and others to the blog post. This can act as a social media press release whereby users can detach the content and embed within their social media outposts, thus reaching a wider social graph than simply broadcasting messages.
If you have assets from a recent campaign – such as photos and video – instead of featuring these on your homepage, why not look to create a blog post whereby these assets can be shared and discussed, creating conversation around content that would otherwise remain undiscovered.
Social media-optimise your blog
To spread the word about your blog content it needs to be optimised for social media. By optimising content essentially it becomes ‘shareable’ amongst other social media platforms.
This can be achieved by adding applications to your blog posts such as a widget for Twitter that allows a reader to ‘retweet’ your blog post. This means that your company can increase word-of-mouth marketing.
Similarly you should look to integrate your other social media outposts such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn within your blog so that users can engage with other areas of your social media footprint.
Do ensure that your blog feed itself is incorporated within your Twitter feed and social network accounts such as LinkedIn to ensure that the content is spread as far and wide as possible.
One of the most simple ways of social media-optimising your blog posts is to add a ‘share this’ function so that readers are given the option to immediately spread your messages to their social networks. Furthermore you can integrate users’ Facebook and Twitter accounts into the comment sections of your blog posts by adding a widget that allows users to message their entire social graph simply by commenting on your blog posts whilst logging in with another social network profile.
Blogging full circle
By ensuring you log all comments made on your blog you will be obtaining cost-effective market research. Any trackback links or retweets of posts should also be monitored as it will help you to understand the profile of your target audience based on the content you are publishing. Therefore you can redefine your approach to appeal to a wider audience or indeed a more targeted audience.
